PS: The stories of What Happens Next and Lifes Halt are unavoidably linked. This will be captured in full in a later chapter devoted to the Start Something split LP and tour. So just be patient...
PPS: Grammar sins abound!
We Sold Our Soul For Hardcore
Lifes Halt
Ernesto Torres (Lifes Halt) I lived in
Bell Gardens, which is by East LA. The big thing back then was backyard gigs.
You just went to all these backyard gigs. You saw a lot of bands that barely
had a tape, most of the bands didn’t have anything. It was cool cuz’ it was
just these ragtag people that just happen to have a bass or guitar and they’d
form a band. It was totally local. And very violent. Which is pretty crazy,
cuz’ you’d be going to East LA and there's all these cholos, and you’re going
to a show. Violence wasn’t as bad as in the ‘80s but it was still pretty bad in
the early to mid-90s.
Félix Reyes (Lifes Halt, No Reply) Me and Ernie and Charlie met in 1995 at a
skating spot at USC by my house…I saw one day that somebody had a backpack that
was on the ground and had a Minor Threat patch on it and had some straight edge
stuff on it. I clearly identified with Minor Threat and was “this is cool,
whose backpack is this?” and it turned out to be Ernie’s. That's how we met and
we started skateboarding together and we started going to shows together. At
that point time, Ernie and Charlie were really big into Strife. I would
accompany them and go to the shows and I was really excited and happy because
there's so much energy to it.
Ernesto Torres Charlie
the guitar player, I knew him the longest. I lived in Bell Gardens. He lived in
Bell Gardens, but he went to a different school and through skating, that's how
I met him. He played guitar. So we skated and then we met Felix, the bass
player, through skating. I might have seen him at a show - like Sick Of It All
at a fest and he got kicked out. We were just skating somewhere at USC and I
just happened to see him. I’m like “you’re the dude who got kicked out!”
Félix Reyes We did start a band at that
time when we realized that we all played something. That was in ’95, that band
was called Revulsion. We played a few shows and actually the last song on the
Lifes Halt demo from ‘97 is a song that Revulsion had to tried to put together…Revulsion
was mostly playing backyard shows.
Ernesto Torres We met and
I don’t know if we ever talked about “yeah we should start a band,” it just
kinda’ happened. From what I remember now, one day we were just playing in a
band.
Félix Reyes A few
years later, lo and behold, we had Lifes Halt.
Jon Westbrook (No Reply, Lifes Halt, Knife
Fight) I knew them from the record store and was friends with them and
suddenly one day they said they had a band.
Ernesto Torres The spirit
that we had was early LA bands. That was us, but musically it was totally not
that. It was just that idea. We just wanted to be fucking crazy and play and hang
out. Musically, we were all pretty different. Felix, he had his own thing. I
had my own thing. Charlie was off somewhere else.
Félix Reyes I had
discovered what is known as Nardcore. I found those records for really cheap, a
friend of mine had this old record store in Hollywood called Green Hell. He was
like “oh you like you like hardcore or skate punk? You should check out
Agression, you should check out Scared Straight.” They were so prevalent
throughout LA because that stuff was like 10 or more years older. It was kind
of not in-the-day and they had made so many of those records that they were
just around everywhere, so I got a lot of cool stuff. That's the stuff that got
me excited because I liked how fast it was and it had some melody and some rhythm.
Ernesto Torres We loved,
of course Black Flag. We were way into Suicidal, that’s how the whole bandana
thing came in.
Jon Westbrook They
showed up and they play at a friend’s yard and were just awesome. There was a
point in the middle of their set that all four of them were off the ground.
Knocking all their cabinets and drums over, somersaulting into each other,
doing wrestling moves. Those early shows were just bonkers. Which is funny
because everyone talks about how No Justice was just the craziest band they’d
ever seen…They were nothing compared to those early Lifes Halt shows. It was
just complete chaos. Ernie sounds like he’s singing to a different band and is jump-kicking
into Charlie who falls backwards into his amp, knocks it all over and the
drummer stands up and kicks the drum set over. It happened every time they
played.
Ernesto Torres We just
wanted to fuckin’ go out there and just be crazy. Not crazy like punch some
dude in the face, but maybe. We just wanted to go out there and put energy into
what we did. These assholes that I used to play with, they were always kicking
my ass like, “dude, can you be a little more energetic.”
…
Félix Reyes Ernie was
a big driver in it all, as far as the art.
Ernesto Torres I didn’t
have any musical talent, but I can draw, so that was my way of contributing.
Félix Reyes He did 99%
of Lifes Halt art and also he wrote 99% of the lyrics, especially early on. He
had cool ideas and we would talk about them. We were all pretty stoked on stuff
that he was saying. I think there was a lot of stuff that we were already again
being informed by, outside of the music or punk or skateboarding world. Things
a little more political. I can think of that song “In My Face” on the 7"
that is about aggressive advertising in lower income neighborhoods.
Ernesto Torres The demo
that we made at this magical space somewhere, I don’t know, it might have been
Santa Barbara. We made this tape and we would just send it out to labels that
we liked. We sent one to Max. At the time, we didn't know Max. We sent it to
Youngblood and it just so happened that Youngblood was the first one to contact
us…that’s how the 7” came along. We started corresponding with Joe and Shawn.
Félix Reyes Certainly
the 7” on Youngblood is what exposed the band to a lot of other people that had
a lot to do with the band at that time and then afterwards.
Ernesto Torres Around the
time that the PCH was around, that's really when it felt right. You knew
everybody. It just felt a lot more intimate, around the mid-90s…It was this
really underground space in Long Beach in the middle of nowhere. Literally just
train tracks, refineries, it was just industrial. That’s where most of the
shows were happening at that time.
Félix Reyes The PCH
club was happening and our first show there, the guy that booked us, Reggie,
who played in a noisy powerviolence band called Gasp, he booked us and I don’t
think he had heard us, or maybe Ernie gave him the demo. He described us as “thrashy
manic, fastcore” on the flyer… I
remember seeing that and reading it and I think me and Ernie were like “what?
Thrashy? Manic? Fastcore? What are you talking about?”… We started
seeing it and hearing it especially applied to us as we became more associated
with What Happens Next. Likewise, I don't think we fully applied the label to
ourselves. We kind of let it just do what it did.
Ernesto Torres Growing up
in LA, everybody speaks Spanish. It was never really a conscious thing for me
like, oh I need to sing in Spanish because it’s my heritage. It’s not until
after a while oh fuck, it just started hitting me more, “damn dude, you're fucking Mexican, you need to celebrate it a little bit more!”
Félix Reyes It had a huge influence on us
politically and with our cultural identity in the way that we positioned
ourselves and saw ourselves in the overall scene, was discovering Los Crudos
was huge for us. I can remember the day, the moment when me and Ernie were
record shopping at this old record store called Zed records in Long Beach.
We’re going through the 7”s and Ernie pulls out this record, it was the first
Crudos record with the glued on parts of the cover on the plastic sheet, and it
was all kind of weird, but it was in Spanish.
Ernesto Torres I'm a
Mexican citizen, you know, I'm a Mexican. I just for some reason have a little
pride in that sense.
Félix Reyes It wasn't immediately apparent. On our
first 7” we don’t have anything that is in Spanish or alludes to that perhaps
except for a couple of themes in a couple of songs. It had a huge impact. Later
on, if you look at the Lifes Halt releases, they’re singing more in Spanish,
they’re singing more about these issues, their sound is perhaps rawer and less
youth crew.
Noel Sullivan (Lifes Halt, Holier
Than Thou) They were recording in Goleta one time and I went to go hang out
with them. They were like, “we have this tour coming up, but the drummer can’t
go” and I was like, “holy shit, I can play drums, I'm not really doing
anything, maybe I can play.”
Félix Reyes Noel is a
good guy and we love him to death and certainly he was the butt of our many
jokes, but that motherfucker gave it back.
Ernesto Torres (Lifes
Halt and No Reply) were just friends and that was our first tour and so we were
just itching to go. It organically happened like, “oh you just started a band,
let’s do a record, let’s go on tour.”
Félix Reyes It was two
bands in a pretty small van.
Ernesto Torres Get your
smelly friends, get in a van and just go. That to me was the embodiment of what
we were doing.
Jon Westbrook We
basically drove straight from LA to Chicago and then across the northern US
over to Boston, New York and then down to Virginia to play Virginia Beach.
Félix Reyes We drove nonstop
from Los Angeles, California to Omaha, Nebraska to play a show the following
day. That was fucking bananas, man.
Noel Sullivan Everyone
was more sober. It wasn’t like we were straight edge bands, everyone was just
still young and pretty chill. That was pretty rad. There was definitely a lot
eating.
Félix Reyes Dave
Mandel likes the bands enough that he wants to put out a split 7” and he was
doing some type of series, I remember. I think he did other split 7”s. Dave
Mandel liked to have fun, we did a stupid amount of - this Is funny because it’s
definitely contradictory - but we did a stupid amount of limited covers and alternative
covers for that split 7”.
Jon Westbrook As far as
I knew there was the colored vinyl that was supposed to be for mailorder and we
did that one with the Simpsons stuff on it and that was for the tour. So there
is supposed to be a tour press, a mailorder version and a regular version and
then Ernie just started making covers for all sorts of different events.
Ernesto Torres Record
collecting was cool, but it became silly…We would make covers just to piss
people off.
Félix Reyes It was sort of like playing
off of that aspect of the culture of record collecting and limited presses and
colored vinyl that was so prevalent at the time.
Jon Westbrook My grand
contribution to it was why don’t you guys make a ton of fake covers, put a big
collage with the real covers on there and make that a cover. From that point
forward, people actually thought that all of those covers existed. I know even
on the Indecision website it said that there were 23 of all them but there
weren’t. I think there were eight total.
Félix Reyes I remember
Ernie being quite critical of that stuff, but also having fun with it and sort
of doing it to be a facetious little jerk…“Oh yeah, limited version? Here’s 50
of them!”
…
Ernesto Torres No Reply
broke up and Jon Westbrook didn’t have a band. He was always around so we were
like, “do you want to join the band?” He is one of those interesting guys, not
in a good way or a bad way, he’s just different.
Jon Westbrook I really
liked it just because I really liked the band. I would go to as many shows and
I could, so I was excited to join the band and take over the world. That's what
it seemed like at the time. Every time we played somewhere else, it was getting
bigger and bigger.
Ernesto Torres I wanted
to bring some of that energy to Lifes Halt.
Jon Westbrook Those guys
were outgoing and talking to everybody and making friends everywhere they went.
The band was fun and energetic.
…
Félix Reyes Much like
the split 7” with No Reply, it almost seemed like a natural thing to happen
between Lifes Halt and What Happens Next. We were such good friends, very
supportive of each other and had a cut-from-the-same-cloth type vibe.
Ernesto Torres I remember
we played Mission Records, I believe and Robert (Collins) was at the show and
he was so into it. Mind you, I was in my early 20s, Felix and them were like
19. Robert at the time, he was in his 30s. We were like fuck dude, you’re this
old and you’re way into it! So we were feeding off that energy…later that night
we played another show in some youth center…and he drove all the way out there
with his old lady to go see us.
Félix Reyes We became
good friends. We have a lot of respect for each other. At that time, it just
made sense that we would play with such a band and that they would play with us
because we were one of a handful of bands that had that general, older style
hardcore approach.
Ernesto Torres We really
looked up to those guys. They were awesome people. They really helped us out
with a lot. Robert booked the whole second tour that we did, booked everything,
did all the work. He was just full of energy, gung-ho, always ready to go.
Félix Reyes At that
time already, they were like seasoned DIY professionals. They had been across
the world in different bands. They had toured. They had put out records and so
they certainly of course put us up even more. They put us under their wing.
They had this aesthetic. They had this term or this label that was associated
with us.
Ernesto Torres We started
taking in things around us, like the people, the places, things that were
happening. It just came about. At that point we had met a lot of people and
just felt really lucky and just wanted to express that a little bit more…I
think that was a six-week tour. You tell Robert, “hey we’re gonna’ go on tour.”
He’s like “ok we’ll be gone for like half a year.” I don’t know if you know
that about Robert and those guys, they don’t fuck around…Robert is still like
that to this day.
Félix Reyes We were
certainly pushed forward by them, but not forced forward, we were having a
great time. We wanted to continue playing and potentially putting out records
and they only got us more excited by one, being enthusiastic about us - our
band and who we were personally - and about wanting to do things together.
Ernesto Torres Things
were evolving for us at that time. We just felt really lucky that we had a lot
of support. People were really into us. We felt at that point, definitely part
of something bigger.
…
Noel Sullivan Ernie and
Felix just didn't see eye to eye on a lot of shit, for whatever reason, you
could call it creative differences.
Félix Reyes We may
have perceived this pressure to be a leader in the scene. We were kind of like
sidekicks to What Happens Next.
Ernesto Torres There was
a lot of things going on. I think me and Felix started having a little
fallout…I think it was expressed, if we don't go to tour Europe or somewhere
else, we’re just gonna fuckin end it. It was not really happening, we couldn't
really come together.
Félix Reyes There
really is something unknown between what happened between me and Ernie, perhaps
that he and I tried maybe once in the past 15 years to address but didn't get
anywhere. There's probably other factors too. He and I definitely after the band
broke up just drifted way apart.
Ernesto Torres We always
got along, but for me personally, I got a little fed up… We reached the end of
the friendship, we all wanted to do different things. Charlie wanted to
concentrate more on school.
Jon Westbrook I didn't
fully understand. When you’re sitting in the van for six weeks with somebody
and eventually you start to get on each other's nerves. Basically, as soon as
we got home they were like we’re gonna’ break up in a few months. The rest of
us spent that whole time trying to get them to reconsider, but they just didn't
want to do it anymore.
Félix Reyes Much like
I think that they had shit going on. They probably thought that I was being
irrational or unreasonable.
Ernesto Torres I like
being a front man, but it’s not like I like writing lyrics. I supposed I was
over it a little bit.
Jon Westbrook Me, Noel
and Charlie didn't want to break up. We're like this tour went really well.
People in Europe are constantly emailing us, we’re getting stuff from Japan, we
could play South America. Why would we stop here?
Noel Sullivan We were
gonna’ try to do Europe, we we're getting a lot of people hitting us up over
there. That would have been awesome but it had just run its course.
…
Ernesto Torres Man, you
want to talk about a last show, fuck, that was awesome! We saw a ton of our
friends all over the place…Tear It Up came and played. We had our friends. It
was at The Smell. Back then The Smell I think comfortably could hold 300 to 400
people, but there was so many people there it was ridiculous. For us, that was
really the measure our success. Just like being able to bring people
(together), people that wanted to see us play. That's all we want! It’s not
about money or some kind of fame. We just had all our friends there. It was
definitely special to have that many people there.
Jon Westbrook That was
the most packed I had ever seen that venue, The Smell. Usually there’s only 100
people and I want to say like 600 people showed up.
Noel Sullivan That was a
crazy fucking show, dude.
Félix Reyes To hear
about people and meet people that had come a long distance for that was just
really kind of mind-boggling and just really special. The fact that we were
actually going through with just ending it all and realizing how much it meant
to people that they would want to travel far to see that. It was bittersweet.
Robert Collins (What Happens Next?) Their last
show was next level. I hadn't cried that hard in years. I spent the last half
of that set literally singing along and sobbing. I remember sitting down on the
back of the stage just shattered after it was done.
Ernesto Torres That one
got me. That one choked me up, man. Rob came over after, he was in tears. He
gave me a hug and I think we fell to the ground…I just can't say enough about
that, just the support we just got from everybody there.
Robert Collins Something
ended. That show was really, really, really special. That band was really
special.
…
Noel Sullivan We had
already done what we were going to do. Hardcore bands don't usually last that
long.
Félix Reyes I don’t
talk to Jon or Charlie or Noel on a regular basis, but if and when I see them
or come in contact with them, it's like “oh hey what's up?” With Ernie, we
don't come into contact at all and when we have it's always been kinda
contentious, it's weird. I think it stems from the fact that I think I was the
one that sort of initiated the “hey you know what, man, we’re done.”
Ernesto Torres I think as
we grew as a band, some people changed. For the most part, we all got along
pretty good. I personally don't talk to anybody in the band for no real
reasons. The only person I really don't talk to is Felix.
Félix Reyes It was a
feeling that I can't describe. I couldn't of described back then, much less
now.
Ernesto Torres We were
just seeing things differently, he didn’t get my sister pregnant or anything.
Félix Reyes It strikes
me that it actually had an impact on not only the time and people living
participating at the time, but like the years after, and even in the later ‘00s
- maybe not so much the 2010s - but hearing from people and being hit up by
people for reunion shows and people saying like, “there's a Latino fest in LA
and it would be awesome if Lifes Halt played, all the kids would love to see
Lifes Halt.” Hearing from friends that are still in LA and going to shows and
in the scene that kids that came after look back on and respect the band.
Jon Westbrook Europe,
South America, Japan, that band could’ve gone everywhere if the band hadn’t
broken up.
Noel Sullivan You know
what is fucking crazy is in Malaysia, they all knew I was in it! It was
tripping everyone out, me included. If we toured Malaysia right now it would be
fucking insane! They are obsessed with Lifes Halt in Malaysia!
Félix Reyes Thinking
that people look back on it, or people that did not see it, would hold it in
some regard as a meaningful and important thing…it’s proof that people did care
and do care.
Ernesto Torres We were
one of those bands, we just didn’t care. We would play anywhere, anytime with
anybody.
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